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Henry Lowood & Brewster Kahle
Henry Lowood
* what is the importance of preserving virtual worlds? * First one can experience a world as experienced by people who lived there 50 years ago * Also, artifacts keep disappearing because erasure is so easy – we need to preserve these intellectual outputs
Brewster Kahle
* started the Internet Archive in 1996 - http://www.archive.org/index.php * people considered it crap, keeping shopping lists, conversations, but you have to get started * we should preserve something worth preserving – but for what – nostalgia? Feel what it was like? Museum? – * should one select? Be illustrative? Again a museum * so collect the beautiful artifacts * what about machinima? A video? An ad? This is usually a tour and not the recreation of an experience * games (missed something here) * promotional videos * ports of old games and experiences e.g. Pong on the iPhone – works best for single player experiences * so why bother? * We will bother if the worlds we make have intrinsic value that others will wish to reexperience * The opportunity to reexperience will be easier if open protocols are used * The WayBack Machine is fantastically popular – every 2 months, all pages were collected. Now you can go back to 1996 and see AltaVista, the first great search engine – and it fit in 2 boxes, with 30 million pages * Now we are nearer 4 billion pages – the equivalent of a Librry of Congress every month – about 2 petabytes database * Added an interface so that you can surf the web as it was * Wildly popular – about 500 hits/second * Lawyers were concerned that we were making copies of other people’s stuff, and wanted to take permission – which was crazy – so it was made non-profit with no ads and no fees – those who wished to be removed were removed – so respect was the ground principle
Henry –
* our thinking about “virtual worlds” may change in a few years * unfortunately there is little history in our thinking * institutions like Stanford save their artifacts over the years * Brewster has a tool called ArchiveIt that will save the metadata of a virtual world (????) – descriptive information, coordinate system * A digital artist, Lynn Hershman, who has art in Second Life, that is collected by Stanford * How can someone acquire a Lynn Hershman work? * What is the citation process that will let us track something in a repository? Is it possible to take data that is in the WayBack Machine and add metadata?
Brewster
* the web is very self-referential, and this includes the WayBack Machine, so it is easy to find * burying things in repositories and in collectors’ hands will make things die. They need to be used, be accessed. Access drives preservation. Particularly in high tech, it takes active use to keep things alive.
Henry
* machinima is very powerful * can take models out of VWs and use in virtual sets * returning in hstory * how archaeology would be represented in virtual worlds * what if remixes happen with the archive
Question - mixed media preservation
* Second Life: the guide, is a book, and will go on a library shelf * But what about new affordances (capabilities) of mixed media? * Henry said he uses game guides in his teaching * But much more difficult finding documented evidence of events in virtual worlds – the assassination of Lord British – the funeral procession in World of Warcraft that was yanked – * Documenting the politics and the life of society in these worlds * In current political campaigns, events happen in virtual worlds – a Ron Paul demonstration in WoW – so real world activities are bleeding through into VWs * 9/11 – go to Microsoft Flight Simulator – even though people are trying to erase the memory that people can fly into the Twin Towers, but you can experience this again in the old game * Neverwinter Nights has the American Revolution experience * Mark Torrano thanked the preservationists, because there is no notation that stores games – would like to donate old games and be able to show old games to new 20 year old designers * Paper and machinima archives re very good. Also developer notes, marketing material. Different classes of materials. Business history. Records of sales. * Talking with tech folks to retrieve history is often not useful. So start saving early. Digital things are lost very easily, unlike physical items. Alexa Internet donates to Internet Archive with a 6 month time delay. SO do make a tie with an organization that can preserve. * Also donate your time. It will change your life. * Also users will respect it. They would like to be immortalized, even if in avirtual world. * The WayBack Machine has a WayBackup Machine. They will try to send you a zip file if you completely lost your site. When Yahoo was turning 10 years old, they found they did not have their old site. * Oral history is never as interesting as capturing something while it is happening. Even just getting someone to talk about an event when it just happened. * What will be the style and vernacular of Virtual World reporting? Will they impact the business of VWs * The issue remains of who owns the digital identity? Machinima uses these identities and objects, and remixes them. Who are the rights holders in Machinima? * Blizzard owns World of Warcraft. But developers of WoW really love machinima, and are hapy to see machinima created. WoW lawyers may feel differently. But in general there is a psitive atmosphere to begin recognizing how to preserve these cultural artifacts. * Brewster thinks “ownership” and “property” are poisoned words. Key thing is not to get people angry or frightened. Creative Commons uses the “property” metaphor, and this is not the way to make a creative space. We want to learn from these creative worlds and apply to the real world. Keep the dreaminess and promise. We do not want to bring the negatives of the real world into our new worlds.
XX, professor from USC, previously at Univ. of Illinois
* studies social and civic aspects of virtual worlds * recruiting subjects in a VW means going through lawyers * showed a typical study in WoW – be careful what you ask for or you will receive more than you can handle * “Entrance, Voice and Loyalty” * 100 people had voice. 100 stayed with text – * question was “how much do you like the others in your group” – voice increases liking * similarly voice increases the number of people you interact with * then received one year of data, 3 TB, of server data – this archive is on the national center for supercomputing at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois * also did a survey – mostly about civic, social science data – attitudes, predisposition * add the survey data to what the actually did – we actually know how much they played WoW, as well as how they reported * hours played per week by age group – older people play more than younger people! * Cross-sectional data – social standing – how much a person has contributed to a group – * Can also do longitudinal analysis – how did behavior change * Can do social networking phenomena – can see people join and leave groups * Can study details of actions – do people stay as solo players * Do people who role play, or kill more characters, have certain social characteristics? * Unit of analysis is the account. One account can have many characters. * //cseonline.ncse.uic.edu:8080/gamelog/getCharacterlist:D… Virtual Worlds Exploratorium Data Bank
Seeing Machines
http://www.seeingmachines.com/
* face tracking using commodity hardware on MacBook Pro * very cool! * face features are outlined automatically – eyes, nose, mouth, in 3D * when person turns, dace turns * real-time – 30-50 fps * the technology was developed for measuring driver fatigue but has more general applications * 6 degrees of freedom tracking of head, followed by feature detection * have also done lip tracking and eye movement tracking, smile detection – mapped to a finite element model of the avatar’s head * head pose can drive a viewpoint such as a camera * they plan to make “facial music” at Burning Man!
Beth Colemen
* Halting State – Charlie Stross * Augmented reality with a distributed network of cell phones * He feels that hypemediation is already present in our lives; SL runs on an iPhone (Converse) * And we need to have “media literacy” and understand the vernacular in these media * We need portals to link our zones * (did not finish writing)
Parvati Dev and W. LeRoy Heinrichs
* did not write
Rebecca Moore (Google Earth Outreach), Jeffrey Schnapp (Stanford) and Wagner James Au (writer)
* Jeffrey – historically people have always lived in virtual worlds or parallel worlds of ghosts and goblins * Rebecca – Google Earth – a realistic virtual globe – immersive – * Inventors of Google Earth were out of video game industry – wanted to create the ultimate backdrop * Rebecca is out of environmentalism – role of mapping to masses – actually used Google Earth to stop a logging plan – then began working for Google for humanitarian relief * http://earth.google.com/outreach/ * Google Earth is a geobrowser – a different way to search the earth * Showed a flythrough and photos that she developed of the planned logging area below Lexington Reservoir, and how it impinged on their drinking water, schools and parks * showed this to Ira Ruskin, assemblyman, that there was going to be in perpetuity logging 7am to 7pm * plan said only defective trees would be removed not old growth – a defective tree is one with multiple tops. But all the old growth has multiple tops. * Also showed that the logging company owned all the access routes to open land owned by mid-Peninsula Open Space District * San Jose Mercury, Al Gore, other politicians, have supported. CBS vening news * Replaced an abstract abstruse black and white map with a galvanizing flyover that was understandable by any person. The virtual reality was more accurate than their reality. * Mountain Top Removal Coal Mining in the Appalachians * A fringing coral reeaf discovered off Australia * An ancient Roman ruin discovered
James Au – a large cat in Second Life was part of a revolution in how SL residents started to influence the company
* in 2003, a monthly fee, and a stipend of Linden dollars. Based on how much you built, you would get taxed * Americana – Fenway Park, Route 66, - a community site – but getting heavily taxed * Launched a giant tea crate rebellion – covered the world with tea crates with manifestos against “Mad King Linden”. There was fire and muskets. A midget with dancing rats. A highly visible anger. This resulted in changing the revenue model. Lawrence Lessig was brought in and he recommended that residents be allowed to own what they built, and not be taxed on their revenue. Now everyone except WoW is playing with these free subscriptions. * In real world activism, the Omidyar has a site in SL representing the genocide in Darfur. Groups, the Green Lanterns (tribute to a Superhero comic), role playing superheroes, arrived and started protecting Camp Darfur against griefers. * Can see Darfur in Google Earth. * Combining Camp Darfur, the role playing heroes, Google Earth, in a machinima, is extremely effective. * Au’s blog http://nwn.blogs.com/ * See his blog image of MetaverseU * *
Jeffrey
* very complex visualization is used in very powerful ways * flythrough is a type of machinima * most non-profits are asking for more narrative-controlled passge throughthese complex visualizations. Exploring mode does not have the narrative overlay and control. (“She does not show the beaver photo now! It should come later in the demo!”) * This story telling function should be pushed to the center of the capabilities of these worlds, to enhance out of world communication. * Need a Strunk and White, a design guide, for creating narratives in Google Earth and other metaverses. * VW users, blogreaders, may not be a large fraction, but they can be very influential because of their important content creation role to the wider audience * See Sculpty Earth Demo in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TFyeItRdJI * Think of VW and SL not as a place you must be in but also a way of generating relevant media, explanations, communication. * Embedding conventional artifacts in virtual media, and vice versa, will be common * Need to step from a street level view of Google earth into a Virtual World like Second Life. Similarly have portals right in the Real World. * Can museums expand their traditional audiences, support curation by crowds * Mixed media – stream a Second Life party on the wall of a real party. Also stream video of a real party into a SL video screen. * There is a rich friction at the interface between real and virtual worlds. In Montreal, an avatar shows up and tours an art exhibit, and is seen by the live audience in Montreal. The guard in the physical space was most frustrated because the keyboard was cut in half and he could only move the avatar, not communicate with the SL avatars. * The recognized art forms at an institution such as Stanford are a very limited set of the existing art forms, many of which are unrecognized. The Video Games Project, started by Henry Lowood, Tim Lenoir and others, recognized that this was one such art form. * Can visitors to a museum be part of the curation and the contribution * Museums, among others, have a very traditional view of the control of content
Rebecca
* Google Earth is used not just by digerati * Indigenous people in the Amazon and farmers in India are using images from Google Earth to protect their land * Internet cafes are a powerful force
James
* most active users of SL are outside Bay Area * top content creator in fashion lives on a farm in Georgia * if it takes 2 hours to get to a real club, why not go to a dance party in SL * Habbo Hotel – in Korea, Facebook meets Habbo Hotel
Rebecca
* Intersection of social networks and mapping 9 million maps ,made – hiking trails,
Jeffrey
* Diasoras will occupy spaces in a different way as they access bandwidth, rather than expression of individuality, as is common in North America * The museum example is intriguing. Dialects, music and art change at river boundaries in a delta – In Brazil, they are creating digital hotspots to preserve the local culture - people are trying to save it – this type of informal museum contribution is a way of empowering against homogenization. * Stanford Humanities Lab is working with some of the Brazilian hotspots. The simplest tools may hve highest power and greatest persuasive power
James
* Katrina * Memorial site In SL had people from all over the world * Every event became a fundraiser * If your friends, virtual friends, are the ones affected, then you become more engaged
Rebecca
* If Google’s obligation to maximize return to shareholders collides with my activities, I do these activities as a private citizen, perhaps using Google tools. * Democracy depends on an informed electorate * Spatial understanding is a potent form of understanding and this has been lacking * We can assist our government by providing our local knowledge, that the government may not have
Henrik Bennetsen
* concluding 3 days of MetaverseU * Rebecca’s comments form a good close * We are speaking to a group of believers. We may need to bring in others who can say where we may be wrong. * The concept that the metaverse is actually a medium, that is usable in many parts of our lives, from entertainment to healthcare to activism and politics. This media literacy will be something we need to begin teaching and learning * The stream into Second Life had many hiccups, but many stayed with the conference anyway * We, and especially those at Stanford, are very privileged. But we saw some ways in which we may be able to do more and give back. * Danish Agency on Science and Technology and Innovation, the Innovation Center, MondoBiotech, Cisco – our sponsors
